384-LED ball receives animation wirelessly and knows its orientation

We get a ton of tips about Kickstarter projects. Here is a great example of what we need to see in order to feature one of them. This LED Blinky Ball developed by Null Space Labs is the target of a rather ambitious fundraising campaign. But in addition to the fundraising write-up they’ve shared extensive details about the prototype.

The ball is made up of sixteen slices; each is its own circuit board hosting an LED driver. All slices use the same PCB design, but one of them has an ATmega328 populated on the board to act as master. Optional components on the master board include an accelerometer, and a Bluetooth module to receive animation data. To get the full effect of the most recent prototype you’re going to want to see the video on their Kickstarter page.

Think this ball looks familiar to you? The original design was developed by [Nikolai] as a performance piece for a friend. This version was inspired by our feature of that earlier project.

So, use this as a template if you’re planning to submit your Kickstarter links to Hackaday’s tips line. We want to juicy details on the project!

So.. if you make a car you’re totally copying Ferdinand Verbiest? I don’t get it. When the chinese copy they usually do it down to the detail if at all possible, and if they can get away with it they take the name too.

Just my opinion here. Their impact on the result is really insignificant compared to the original work done by Nikolai. It’s one of the things where the idea matters and the implementation is really trivial. I don’t see a lot of improvement on the original idea and I couldn’t really care less about their redesign which is only important to them and nobody else. It’s a ripoff.

Just my opinion that action taken to psychically make something is more important than the idea of making something. I think about making stuff i never get done all the time! This doesn’t mean when someone else takes the time to do it that i should get butt hurt they stole my idea i never had the will to complete. I dunno maybe it’s an american thing.

Well, out of the scope of this site, you’re probably right, Sirbutts. Even though it’s not like Nikolai only had the idea, he had the implementation too. And now there is a group of people who took his idea and they are trying to make a profit off it AND they get free publicity here on HaD. This last part is what just does not feel right.

But in the end I guess taking an idea of someone else and turning it into profit, yes, is a hack of sorts.

There is always room for improvement, the point is that these guys actually produced something. RGB LED strips would be a smart addition, but would also ramp that price up a bit. Personally, I prefer the unprotected PCB structure – the PCB becomes a part of the form, rather than purely for function. And I’ll bet that the use of an ATMEGA328 was intentional, so that it can interact with the Arduino environment and be more beginner-friendly.

If you look very closely, NSL released the board files and C code in their SVN, though it does take a bit of digging. They named the project “NSL_LED_Ball_1S”, and you can find it here: http://www.032.la/svn/listing.php

We have released everything to the prototypes, it is not linked directly because it is a prototype and its not the final revision, so rather than everyone run off and make it from the prototype, it’d be fix the problems and then say , go forth and light up the world. We’re revising it from the five prototypes, feedback from people building it etc.

As with all the stuff we do, its all public right from the start, instead of only release it after we’ve hit out targets or such.. Which of course means stuff might be broken or poorly commented :) but it’ll get better and i’ll check in the PC and android clients too.

scary idea:
1) re-build with IR-leds and memory card
2) put in ball 2 diffuse IR-“light”
3) design a moving 3D ghost-face “video” file for the device. (or any other scary face)
4) fine tune “brightness” of IR-led / vid. file until “face” shows up on (cellphone)ccd-camera. (instead of blinding the camera completely, which tends to happen at high intensity)
5) stage a ghost sighting by using cell camera to see in the dark… muahahahaha a glowing ghost… but wait, we cant see it with bare eyes!